


wishbone

by scary_crow



Category: Naruto
Genre: Implied Past Rape, Implied Torture, M/M, Major character death - Freeform, Naruto probably has stockholm syndrome, anyway I'll tag the big ones, it's real dark and twisty but also soft?, spoiler: it isn't Naruto or Sasuke, yeah so idk how to tag this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-11
Updated: 2019-11-11
Packaged: 2020-12-07 20:50:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20982179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scary_crow/pseuds/scary_crow
Summary: He covers Itachi’s mouth with the flat palm of his hand when he fucks into him, because Itachi’s voice is the one thing he can never pretend around, can never twist into Sasuke’s voice, even when he makes Itachi pitch his vowels differently, or go rougher on the sibilants, even when Itachi saysusuratonkachiwith a horrible gleam in his eye and Naruto shudders and comes apart.





	1. for the kyūbi

**Author's Note:**

> The second chapter is ItaShi, just to warn you. Also, please know that I am acutely aware that this is the fic that confirms my place in Hell. 
> 
> OST: [Maybe, Maybe](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0z7vScs2ao) by Nico Stai

_'falling is the essence of the flower'_

—Yukio Mishima

**shrike**

“Is all this for the kyūbi?” Naruto asks, although he knows the answer. After months of torture and interrogation supplemented by _this_, by Itachi’s lukewarm body and his long fingers, webbed with veins, by dark eyes and fists under the sheets—after days that included nothing but the most creative forms of pain (and the Akatsuki were not a dull bunch) and nights that began with Itachi healing the worst of it and culminated in his letting Naruto shove his skeleton of a body against the nearest flat surface—after months of the same delusive dance, Naruto knows the answer better than he knows the scars underneath his own eyes.

Itachi nods, of course, mouth open around a moan. Dark hair falls alongside his jaw, shadows like war paint on the high bones of his cheeks. “But I also like it,” he says, and rolls his body up and down again. 

Naruto kisses him for his honesty, flexing his fingers and swallowing the very soft sounds that accompany his motions. He has learned to hear him at his most reticent, openmouthed but wordless, pitching his head back against the edge of the futon until all Naruto can see is the shifting musculature beneath his jaw, his skin fine as washi. 

Most of the earlier physical pain is gone, except for a headache that won’t quit, but the various genjutsus the Akatsuki used still haunt the halls of his mind. Itachi hasn’t been down to visit with his Sharingan yet—his singular role seems to rely on making Naruto feel _good _afterward_—_but Naruto is certain the day will come when it’s only him and Itachi and the tsukuyomi, miles of trauma yet unexplored. He asks Itachi if he knows when.

Itachi lifts his head to look at him, expression three-fourths blank, but Naruto knows what the rest of it means: the slight furrow between his brows is feigned confusion, the twitch at the corner of his mouth admiration. He does like when Naruto is blunt with him, and it’s easy to give him what he wants. There are no secrets between them other than the big one, which Itachi doesn’t know Naruto doesn’t know, because if he knew, Naruto would be dead.

“I don’t know,” Itachi admits. He presses a damp hand to the back of Naruto’s neck. “Probably soon. Kiss me.”

Naruto does as he’s told, pushing hair from Itachi’s forehead with one hand and meticulously crooking the fingers of his other. Itachi’s body responds throughout, hands on Naruto’s jaw, on his shoulders, his waist, pressing lightly—soft but not intimate—his knees falling to the futon on either side of Naruto, chest heaving, the already thin aperture of his eyes narrowing. Naruto moves Itachi onto his side and settles behind him, silent, rolls his lube-drenched hand over his cock until it seems like it won’t hurt either of them too badly, and right before he slides into place he tugs on Itachi’s hair until the position of his face is exactly how Naruto wants it.

Sometimes, like tonight, when Naruto arranges Itachi’s slender body _just so_, tilting his head so that a certain piece of his jaw catches the moonlight, bending his knee at a particular angle, the body beneath him becomes Sasuke’s body, the hair—half tied back with silk—Sasuke’s hair, the eyes his eyes.

When they stripped him down the first time and took his weapons and any extraneous items of clothing, Itachi had let him keep the ring. It was a small kindness.

Still, he covers Itachi’s mouth with the flat palm of his hand when he fucks into him, because Itachi’s voice is the one thing he can never pretend around, can never twist into Sasuke’s voice, even when he makes Itachi pitch his vowels differently, or go rougher on the sibilants, even when Itachi says _usuratonkachi_ with a horrible gleam in his eye and Naruto shudders and comes apart. 

“You’re rough today,” Itachi reflects.

“I’m always rough.”

It’s a lie. There are nights when Itachi looks so much like his little brother that Naruto _needs_ to be gentle with him, and then it is all half-silent apologies (half because his body speaks where his mouth doesn’t) and misty blue eyes and Naruto’s lips against the plane of Itachi’s forehead, as if he isn’t the younger of the two, as if he hasn’t just resurfaced from hours of mind games and excruciation. On these nights, Naruto doesn’t need comfort, or if he does, he chases it in the form of offering a semblance of it to Itachi, who doubtless needs it less than he does but who, for the kyūbi, pretends. Naruto has no illusions where Itachi is concerned, but on the nights when Itachi silently (for hours) lets him play out his fantasies or memories—which are no longer nice but penitent—he says_ thank you, thank you_ into the knob of Itachi’s shoulder regardless and lapses into dreams. 

Itachi doesn’t comment on Naruto’s lie and Naruto is, again, thankful. He pets his hand through Itachi’s long hair, untangles the tie and slips the fabric around his wrist.

He does feel rougher than usual tonight, for one reason or another. Kisame had not been easy on him this morning, and some of the other members whose faces he couldn’t see had been impatient and sloppy with their genjutsu, which left Naruto’s head feeling like a training post rattled by overly eager genin. But frustration washes out of him so easily these days, and his clenched fist—knobby knuckles soft from desuetude, fingernails wafer-thin—falls open into something more inviting that Itachi can take and pull and use to guide Naruto into something he likes. They do this to each other night after night—arrange and rearrange limbs until one or the other or sometimes both are satisfied—are even _good_ at it, and even though Naruto knows the game they’re playing better than he knows a shōgi tray, he likes the way his battered body responds to touch, too tired to object.

With what little sinew his exhaustion allows, he fucks Itachi into the arm he has braced across his chest. Itachi says nothing this time (another reason to thank him), but his breath rasps heavy in Naruto’s ear, and when he comes around Naruto’s hand, body stiffening, Naruto releases his hair and holds him through it. 

Afterward they remain quiet, Itachi resting long fingers over the left side of Naruto’s chest, Naruto half blacked out and dizzy from old pains and new pleasures. 

There’s a curt knock that indicates nothing other than the tray of food that is slid underneath the door, metal scraping the tatami in the usual places. Itachi looks at him, asking if today he is going to eat, and Naruto shrugs. His stomach has shrunk in the time he has been here, just like every other part of him, even if he continues to eclipse Itachi, but Itachi is small and always has been and Naruto wasn’t like this before—his bones jut out at unfamiliar angles and his skin is tinged blue under the still fading tan. 

The dance is finite: Naruto is going to die, and his only role in the matter is whether it happens before or after they figure out how to extract the kūbi. 

If he holds out long enough, the villages might even drum up some plan of defense. The thought is blurry and far away when Itachi brings the tray to the bed and lifts a square of rice to Naruto’s mouth.

“Eat and we can go again,” he offers, black eyes glinting. The shutters over the window rattle; brain still in retrograde from the high, it takes Naruto a moment to recognize the gathering storm for what it is. 

Naruto hates desert storms the most, not that he’s recently had the opportunity to get caught it one. But even in his room, the air turns dry and the lash of the wind against the windowpane unsettles him, makes his fingers twitch, aching to form hand signs he knows are no good with the seal they’ve placed over the back of his neck. The hairs there and on the backs of his hands stand up, vibrating. The bottom of his throat feels grainy, like he’s swallowed sand.

Itachi smiles and rests the chopsticks back on the tray. “You’re safe, Naruto-shōnen,” he says, to which Naruto chuckles and runs a hand through his hair because he hasn’t been safe in years.

“I suppose a storm won’t be the thing to end me.” 

Itachi _mm_’s thoughtfully, like Naruto’s death really is up for debate. 

“Maybe I could _join_ you guys.” Naruto finds the energy to waggle his eyebrows at Itachi, who actually laughs—loudly—and Naruto has to roll onto his side and curl his fingers around Itachi’s ankle, massaging around the delicate bones. “What? I’d be a great Akatsuki.”

“You would be terrible.”

“Would you vouch for me? You could, like, give a speech and then put it to a vote or something.”

“Mm.”

Naruto slides his hand up Itachi’s calf. “Clearly I haven’t done a good enough job of seducing you.” He keeps his voice playful, because he knows that is not what’s happening here. 

“That is not what’s happening here.” 

Naruto rolls his eyes and falls back onto the futon, swallowing the _obviously, teme _back into the pit of his stomach from where it had crawled up his throat and settled behind his tongue. He isn’t sure if he could have gotten the phrase out anyway, certain words and expressions dusty from disuse, but he keeps them in the dark beneath his bones anyway, not _just in case_ but _just because_. Just because he loves, just because he misses, just because he has decided—in the narration of his life he has been trying to assemble—that this part doesn’t count, that it began and ended with Sasuke, with the look in his eyes when Naruto bookmarked his own life with the words _because_ _you’re my friend_ and _I love you._

Itachi’s calf flexes beneath his touch, and Naruto squeezes. For all that Itachi is rawboned, he is also sinewy, lean lines of muscle and tendon, slender only in the way a good senbon is slender, custom-wrought to kill. He wonders if Itachi will be the one to do it when the time comes, wonders if he’ll use his hands. He says as much.

Itachi raises his eyebrows—intrigued. “How would you want it?”

“Eh, I don’t know. Come here.”

Itachi does, climbing over Naruto like a shadow, long hair tucked behind his ears. He looks deadly.

“Maybe like this?” Naruto reaches for Itachi’s wrists and pulls him forward until his hands are on his neck, thumbs just above his collarbones. Itachi flexes his fingers and openly stares, but he doesn’t even glance at Naruto’s eyes before squeezing, doesn’t care, but if he did, Naruto knows he would see the pupils blown, orange licking at the circumferences, empty of blue. 

When he finally does meet Naruto’s gaze, sitting back, he speaks very slowly, voice smooth as rustling feathers. “I think I’d rather put something through your heart.”

Naruto lets arousal he wouldn’t have been comfortable with in another lifetime wash over him, masks it with lazy humor. “Beggars can’t be choosers, I guess.” He grins, pulls Itachi down by his shoulders. “Come on, fuck me then. You have the rest of your life to think up a sexy way to kill me.”

Itachi _mm_’s, and Naruto’s brain alchemizes the syllable into the more familiar _hn_, and it doesn’t take long at all for Itachi to pick him apart into conveniently sized fragments, for him to swear he feels the thorns buried alongside the knobs of his spine, for Itachi’s _shh, shh, Naruto-kun _with his forehead against Naruto’s and his nails over his heart to finally tip him over the edge.

Itachi’s eyes flash red when he follows. The blinds clatter. As expected, he doesn’t have enough time for sleep between Itachi and the storm and the threat of morning. Which, conveniently, means he’ll be good and numb and likely display some form of exhausted hysterics in his next session with Kisame.

It is the most consolation he’s had in a long, long time.

-x-

**tomb**

On hands and knees, Naruto spits blood against the tatami, door thudding shut behind him. He drags his tongue across his teeth and finds some of them loose, hopes Kurama will succumb to his present but unspoken complaints and heal him. They had been close today, too close, and even the usually solid floor feels shaky when Naruto drops his forehead to its surface. He rolls himself onto his side, counts broken ribs instead of sheep and tries for a nap.

His dreams can’t really be called dreams, because he doesn’t access a deep enough sleep. Instead, it’s him and Kurama back when they first met, growling and shouting at each other through dinghy metal bars—confines that existed as a symbol more than anything—voices echoing throughout the dungeon, spitfire insults born from instinct rather than practice. 

Slowly, like syrup, the apparitions melt into the present. 

“Why would I need protection?” Itachi’s voice floats down to him from another world, a fuzzy sheet of words on a defunct radio, and Naruto realizes he’s been speaking his delirious tirade against Kurama aloud.

_I’m trying to protect you, you moron! _

Naruto blinks his eyes open, doesn’t bother stifling a groan as he grumbles the words “wasn’t talking to you” and reworks his body into a supine position. The low ceiling reminds him of the shitty inns he and Ero-sennin used to stay in for weeks at a time, the memory of what feels like a previous life not without grief.

Darkness passes across his face, heavy behind his eyelids, as Itachi kneels next to him, and the image of a hawk’s shadow sliding over long fields, subverting detail, arises in his pain-addled mind. He’s aware that a significant portion of his brain is occupied with Itachi, knows it is because the only pleasant physical sensations he experiences these days occur with and because of him. It’s a cold-blooded scheme, vicious and relentless for hours until he can’t think straight and he and Kurama are both bone-weary just from keeping him alive, and then Itachi—soft hands and an even softer voice, healing jutsus and crisp cotton sheets, trying to caress information he doesn’t have out of him.

Itachi’s fingers are cool against his temples, drawing his mind from its recesses.

“I know,” he says, once Naruto is more alert. He tilts his head inquisitively. “How is he, by the way? Today looked . . . promising.”

He sounds almost concerned, like if he had just replaced the word _promising_ with _difficult_, or _rough_, or anything that acknowledged the pain, Naruto might have believed that he cared.

Naruto chooses to ignore his question—he knows Itachi knows he won’t answer it—in favor of asking his own. “You were there?”

“I was, but only today. I wanted to see what you looked like.”

Naruto doesn’t know what that _means _or how to begin responding to it. 

“You’re loud.” 

He grunts, forcing himself into a sitting position. “Glad you enjoyed the show.”

They sit there for a moment in the dark, a single lightbulb swinging from a wire overhead, Naruto with his legs stretched out in front of him and Itachi crouched on the balls of his feet. Outside it’s quiet, but Naruto is certain this is only the eye of the storm. From behind long bangs, Itachi watches him, following the movement of his hand when he pulls at one of his cramping legs to bend his knee, stare descending when he foolishly takes a too-deep breath and the movement catches at one of his ribs, chest heaving. Same as every day, Naruto wonders what Itachi sees when he looks at him. If he sees a boy, rumpled and sleepy and small, or if he sees his little brother’s best friend, his rival, his partner; if he sees Konoha’s Hokage—Naruto wonders if anyone would see that anymore—or if he sees this new Naruto, this light-starved, veneer of a man, all bright laughter and irony and a lazy, easy exhaustion.

He notices just then that Itachi had brought him tea, green in a russet mug.

“Mm, I didn’t enjoy it, actually.”

Naruto’s hand falters on its way to the cup. “Okay?” Itachi is strange today, thoughtful and direct. He finally manages to draw the cup to his lips and drink from it. Though he has no idea what kind, the tea is warm and goes down easily. 

“They’re all really novices at this. Especially Kisame. He has no delicacy.”

Naruto huffs out a laugh: there is the Itachi he knows. From remnants of past conversations, he recalls a special fondness Itachi has toward the sharkface. 

He quirks an eyebrow. “You mean he doesn’t know where to poke?”

Itachi says nothing. 

“And you do.” Naruto leans forward, setting the mug between his knees. “I give you as much.” Not gave. “So why are you not—“

“Quiet.” Itachi kisses the tip of Naruto’s nose, which Naruto crinkles immediately after.

Itachi’s lips move to his jawline, lave sloppily (if Itachi is ever sloppy it is here) over his neck, give way to teeth when Itachi bites and sucks a bruise over his carotid, settling himself between Naruto’s legs on the floor. Usually he finishes healing him first, and something about tonight feels a little rushed, a little panicky.

It would be easy to die like this, Naruto thinks, and instead of pushing the thought away like he used to, he indulges it, lets the idea of eternal serenity shudder its way up his spine vertebra by vertebra. It would be easy to die with Itachi’s hands on him, tepid, deft, pinning his body to the earth while his spirit slips elsewhere. It doesn’t even have to be a sword through his heart. He could die of a certain combination of old wounds and exhaustion, falling backward into night. 

“Hey Itachi?”

Itachi removes his teeth from Naruto’s throat to look at him. 

“Heal my ribs for me now, would you? Kurama’s a lazy bastard.”

Itachi hums, but his hands work the zipper of Naruto’s threadbare shirt. “I can do that.”

The zipper breaks because it is old, and they pass the next half hour in silence, Itachi dragging his hands from one ache to the next, checking for internal contusions and organ damage, while Naruto closes his eyes and pictures Sasuke hovering over him after an especially intense field day.

_I don’t know any healing jutsus,_ he had confessed, years past. 

_“You don’t—how can you not know _any_? Damn, teme, what have you been—“ _He had stopped immediately upon seeing the look in Sasuke’s eyes. _“Let’s get Sakura to teach us some.” _

Itachi knows many, many healing jutsus, and he uses them efficiently, well worn in his line of work.

“Hey Itachi?” If Itachi is going to be mysterious tonight, then Naruto is going to have to feign levity for the both of them. He tries for a cheeky smile. “Do you do this a lot anyway? Sleep with the Akatsuki’s captives?” As if that was all this was. 

Itachi pinches the soft skin of his arm. “Tsk. No, of course not.” He finishes with Naruto’s ribs, performs a series of hand signs Naruto doesn’t recognize, and runs his palms over Naruto’s stomach and thighs, pushing his knees down. “I had never before you.”

“Never slept with a handsome captive or never . . . .” But Itachi’s eyes, so rarely revelatory, give him away. 

“Ah.” Naruto swallows. He feels strange possessing this knowledge, not that it matters, not that any of this really matters. But it is a mirage in a desert—this veneer of meaningful exchange, the routine of it enough to keep him satiated. “Okay. Was there anyone you wanted to with, before this?” He waves a hand idly between the two of them.

Itachi’s eyes flash. “Yes.”

Naruto goes for broke. “What was their name?”

Itachi unfolds his legs around Naruto’s hips so they they sit in an X formation, noses brushing. Naruto feels less fractured. He breathes deeply, and his ribs still hurt but they don’t crackle or burn like splintered firewood. 

“It was a long time ago, Naruto-shōnen.” 

Naruto squints and brings a hand up to push some of Itachi’s hair behind his ear, pretending to scrutinize his features as if he doesn’t know exactly what Itachi looks like, even in the dark. “You’re not even thirty,” he says. “It can’t have been that long ago.”

Slowly, Itachi presses his lips to Naruto’s, the kiss quick and dry and chaste.

“Shisui.”

“_Shunshin_ no Shisui?”

“Yes, Naruto.” Itachi smiles, just barely. He pushes his thumb into Naruto’s mouth, gliding it along his bottom teeth. “You remind me of him, actually.”

Naruto doesn’t say _you remind me of someone as well_ because Itachi knows, it’s obvious, and also because if he says Sasuke’s name aloud he thinks he might cry. Instead he says, “Weren’t you guys, like, cousins?”

Itachi huffs softy and rolls his eyes. It’s superfluous, Naruto realizes; he has heard it a thousand times. 

“Do you dream about him?” he asks when Itachi takes his hand with the one not inside Naruto’s mouth and folds his fingers over Naruto’s.

Itachi nods. “And nothing else.”

Even with everything that has happened, he still wants to reach out, to say _I’m sorry _and_ I can’t imagine, _to draw real emotion from Itachi—even if it is pain—and smooth it over with his hands and mouth. He wants to hear exactly what happened between the two of them, to see if it reminds him of himself and Sasuke in any way. Because Itachi is so much like his brother that sometimes it hurts to look at him. 

Instead he says, “But you’re stuck with me.”

“Mm.”

Itachi replaces his thumb with his mouth, and Naruto realizes he doesn’t have anything else to say. He focuses on his breath—an old, _old_ training exercise—and lets Itachi run his hands across his body, pausing every now and again to press down lightly, and it takes Naruto longer than it should have for him to realize Itachi is mapping out his tenketsu. He lets him; he doesn’t have any reason not to. He chafes his hands against Itachi’s sides, underneath the Akatsuki robes, where he feels muscles ripple with every move Itachi makes. Between kisses, Naruto mumbles. Just trivial things, like how pretty Itachi is with his hair and his eyes or how much Naruto enjoys that particular thing he does with his tongue. He wonders what Shisui had liked most about Itachi.

Naruto groans. Even though Itachi had fixed his broken teeth, his mouth still tastes like blood, tangy and acerbic, and he chases the flavor of Itachi’s mouth to make it go away.

Itachi drags his lips from Naruto’s mouth, back to his neck, and inhales. “You taste like—“

“Blood, I know.”

Itachi hums. “I like it.”

“You’re sort of creepy sometimes, you know.”

At that, Itachi freezes, hands falling into Naruto’s lap. He rocks his forehead back and forth against Naruto’s shoulder but says nothing for a moment. Then, “I’m tired.”

_Everyone is tired,_ Naruto thinks. Itachi, the Akatsuki, Konoha—it’s a mad war and this was the best way he knew how to fight it, to surrender himself for a temporary armistice.

Naruto drags Itachi to the futon easily. He’s pliant and small in the dark of the room.

“Here.” He sits him down, then drags the crumpled blanket from the end of the futon and drapes it over Itachi’s shoulders. Their hands brush when Itachi reaches to keep it in place. “Just sleep, tonight.”

Itachi looks hesitant, which is unusual. This whole evening has been unusual, but Naruto doesn’t think he has the energy to unpack the details. 

“It’s fine,” he insists, not really wanting to argue. He sidles up behind Itachi and rests his head on his shoulder, ignoring the tickle of Itachi’s hair against his face. “Just, I don’t know, pretend I’m Shisui or something. And sleep.”

Itachi might have said thank you, but it’s difficult to tell. He does, however, let Naruto bundle him up in blanket and sheets and hold him through the night.

The last thing he says before Naruto finds sleep is the word_ tomorrow_, and suddenly the room is a tomb and he is being buried alive.

-x-

**red**

The next day, Kisame is replaced with Itachi, sitting silent as death on a three-legged stool in front of Naruto, eyes Sharingan red.

“You’re good at that.” Naruto coughs up the words later, when Itachi comes to heal the physical damage.

“Like you said, you show me where to poke.”

“I’m not giving up the bijū, Itachi.” But behind his eyes, all he can see is Sasuke in the tsukuyomi, one alternate universe after another in which the Sasuke he knows—already critical of Konoha and of the jinchūriki system—has been tweaked just enough that he believes the Akatsuki are in the right. He sits with Sasuke over ramen at Ichiraku (because Itachi _knows_), and Sasuke begs him to do the right thing, rationalizes it even, and it isn’t until the very last moment when Naruto refuses to listen to him that the Sasuke in the tsukuyomi turns cruel and bitter and twists the proverbial kunai into Naruto’s chest just so. _Practice for the real thing, _Naruto had thought, as the illusions vanished and Itachi’s pale face and Akatsuki robes swarmed his vision. He had been blacked out for hours afterward. 

Occasionally, Itachi had been capricious, and Naruto had watched his beloved die from a long, slow illness, the flicker of the tsukuyomi hardly important anymore as he held his hand. 

Itachi heals him quickly, then pushes and pulls him to the futon, leaving him there for a moment before returning to sit at the edge of it. 

“I asked for some food. No ramen, but we might have soba. Please eat today.”

This might be too much, Naruto thinks. This might be the thing that breaks him. This Itachi with his milk-warm hands and stagnant—but existent—concern and Naruto’s inability to sever him from the Itachi of this morning, who had been cruel and erratic. He had been exactly what Naruto had expected, exactly what Naruto had_ seen_ in incidents prior to his surrendering to the Akatsuki, but it had still wrecked him. Between Itachi and the memory of Sasuke, Naruto is going to break.

He listens to the creak of the shutters as the storm outside rages, and—as a survival mechanism—relapses into banter.

“You’re annoying.”

Itachi laughs from his position at the base of the futon, which isn’t fair—it isn’t fair because Naruto _likes_ the sound of his laughter. It makes him feel warm, even with the shivers the storm drives through him. “I’ve heard worse.”

Of course he has. “Hm, c’mere,” Naruto says. “You look nice today.”

Itachi raises his eyebrows, the closest to shock Naruto has ever seen him.

“What?” Naruto teases, but it’s honest. “You do. I like your . . . hair bun thing.”

Itachi unties his robe and crawls up the futon to settle in Naruto’s lap, eyes narrowed. Naruto can feel the rigidity of his body against his own, like he is expecting an attack any moment, and he thinks he probably should punch him. Just once for good measure, but he can’t bring himself to do it. Instead, he latches onto Itachi’s hips, squeezes.

“Thank you, Naruto.”

Naruto runs a hand over his spine, bending him closer. “Are you tired today?”

“Not anymore.”

“Good. I really wanna fuck you.”

Itachi’s smile is wide and slow. “Thought you might.”

It’s one of those nights where Itachi disappears and it’s only him and Sasuke and the dark. Naruto is callous the first time, folds the body below him in half and silences every moan with a thrust and his nails digging red crescents into the skin around his partner’s mouth. But the second time, he lets himself be weighted down into the mattress, succumbs to long black hair falling at just the right angles, and Sasuke’s hands smooth and unhurried over his belly and his legs. Rocking up against the feeling of fullness, he says Sasuke’s name for the first time in over a year, and comes apart easily.

He’s standing in the bathroom, elbows on the dirty sink, bleeding profusely from where one of his half-healed ribs had broken and pierced the skin. It had shaken him out of his post-orgasm haze with the feeling of sticky blood hot over his abdomen. Itachi had been too quick to heal him; he hadn’t been careful enough. Now, he bangs on the locked door and calls Naruto’s name softly.

“Let me fix it for you,” he says. But Naruto doesn’t want to be fixed. He leans on the edge of the sink and lowers himself onto the cold linoleum floor. He’s bleeding, and it hurts, and he doesn’t want anybody to heal it, because it’s the first time in a long time that he really, desperately—with a paroxysm of need he didn’t know was possible after so long compartmentalizing—wants to go home.

It’s two in the morning when he finally stumbles back into the bedroom and lets a wide awake Itachi stop him from bleeding out.

It is four in the morning, and it’s raining in the desert, when the door to Naruto’s room isn’t opened with a key, it doesn’t get busted in, doesn’t break—it _melts_. 

And then Sasuke is there, surrounded by a withering Ameterasu, Mangekyō Sharingan pinwheeling in his eyes. 

-x-

**amagaki**

In Naruto’s mouth, death tastes like persimmons. 

There had been a tree near his old genin rooms, and every year he would wait until they were sweetest and then pick a bowl full of them. They tasted mild and sweet, and he ate the amagaki in place of meals on occasions when he was too sad or angry to bother boiling water for ramen. 

“You came,” Itachi says, and even though it’s right by Naruto’s ear, it sounds muffled and dilute. 

It also sounds relieved, by which Naruto isn’t particularly surprised. 

Reality fragments. He is alone by the window, watching Sasuke march toward his brother under dim light. Naruto doesn’t really understand the Mangekyō, but he has heard of kotoamatsukami from faded scrolls and patchwork stories Sasuke had told him about his childhood cousin’s coveted dōjutsu, and now he feels its aftereffects like splinters through his mind. Faintly, he realizes that Sasuke's presence means that peacetime is over, if it had ever really begun, that all of _this_ may have been for nothing.

Itachi coughs into the back of his arm and puts on a half smile, so gentle and so without malice that Naruto doesn’t recognize him for a moment. “You’re stronger than you used to be, little brother.”

“Are you dying?”

He registers shock on Itachi’s face. “How—“

“It doesn’t matter. Tell me.”

Itachi nods, just barely. Sasuke makes a pained sound which Naruto hears as _I can’t believe you’re going to make me do this_. 

After that, everything happens too fast for memory to fully take hold. 

Naruto can’t see Sasuke’s face anymore, but the line of his back is tense when he climbs onto the futon and shoves Itachi’s back against the wall, when he picks up the discarded kunai.

Naruto hears himself call Sasuke’s name, but he regrets it the instant Sasuke glances back at him with a look on his face that is only partly anger; mostly, he looks young and afraid. He looks like the Sasuke Naruto had loved as a teenager, and Naruto understands the unspoken message: he needs this for himself. 

For just a moment, Itachi’s eyes shift to Naruto. Slanted shadows from the blinds slide across his face. 

“Don’t look at him,” Sasuke commands, his voice breaking on the last word. 

The chain of blame is impossible to unravel.

If Naruto is going to be practical about it, he could pin the fault solely on Itachi. Ultimately, it had been Itachi who had cemented the fate of the Uchiha and simultaneously fashioned his child brother into the avenger that he had been for much of his life. It had been Itachi ghosting through the compound under cover of dark, weapons drawn and newly-acquired Mangekyō at the ready. It had been Itachi in Sasuke’s head—then and now. 

It could also be the fault of the jōnin, of the families that had allowed children to train as black ops, of the guardians in Itachi’s past who had failed him, of the adults who had planned for a coup in favor of peace. 

But it very well could have been Konoha, Naruto realizes sadly. It could have been the statutes the village has lived by for years without criticism, the callousness and inflexibility that Kakashi had tried to warn them about in his and Sasuke’s early days as genin, when Naruto had lived near the persimmon tree and tasted death enough times to pluck it clean. 

In the end, however, Naruto blames Itachi’s death on himself. He knows the love that Sasuke has for Itachi is overwhelming, but he also knows it isn’t enough—not after Naruto—and he doesn’t believe Itachi ever thought that it would be.

Because Naruto is his person. Naruto has Sasuke’s heart, always will, even when the kunai slides slow between Itachi’s ribs and Naruto’s whole body stiffens with the desire to reach out and _make it stop_. 

Instead, he chokes down any and all protest as it occurs, because he doesn’t know how many Uchihas’ lives he is allowed to beg the universe for and he already got on his knees for the one that mattered most.

He watches Sasuke bend and rest his head on his dying brother’s shoulder. He hears Sasuke whisper something that sounds like forgiveness. He hears Itachi say the words_ I know_.

Lightning flickers. Naruto vomits onto the floormats, and the bile tastes like persimmons.


	2. flowers on the nakano

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Set sometime in Itachi's past. ItaShi.

**flowers on the nakano **

Itachi fell back against the riverbank, cold body sinking into warm grass and sand. Sunlight in Konoha was different than anywhere else; it wove through tree branches, made supple and soft by the coven of leaves. In Mist, the trees had been cobwebby, too delicate to climb and too thin to warp the sunlight in the way Itachi liked it. The dispatch for a one-week mission had easily turned into two; not everyone made it back, and Itachi had had to wait around with a corpse until hunter-nin arrived. 

The wind picked up. Itachi closed his eyes and breathed it in—warm, sun-baked grass and milkweed. It brought back the only semblance of childhood he remembered: bootleg sake hidden away in weapons pouches, catfish burning over a makeshift fire, the croak of a thousand frogs and somebody singing.

He was young still, but he was no longer a boy. He had killed people with his _eyes_.

“Sasuke’s looking for you.” 

Itachi blinked at the face above him. Shisui laughed and stretched his legs out next to Itachi, leaning back on his palms. 

“How did you get here so fast?” Itachi asked. He hadn’t heard any leaves crinkling or twigs snapping. 

Shisui shrugged. “It’s a body flicker technique I’m working on.” 

Itachi nodded and hummed, closing his eyes again now that he knew he was safe. “Teach it to me.”

“Yeah, okay.”

They stayed like that for a while, and Itachi was glad for these moments of quiet. Between the clan’s designs and the Hokage’s orders, he didn’t have much time alone with his thoughts. Though perhaps that was the point. 

“How do you have time to be inventive?” he asked finally, rolling onto his side to make eye contact with Shisui. He missed his cousin, didn’t get to see him as often as he liked, but when he did it was like the world spun like a beigoma and shifted into another, gentler dimension. He could whisper; he didn’t have to wash the stench of blood off himself afterward.

“Hmm, I don’t know. Lots of waiting around time on missions I guess.”

Itachi fought the urge to reach out and touch him, chalking it up to a post-mission hunger for physical contact. He had never concluded his missions in that way, though many shinobi did, mostly because he found the idea of the act itself disconcerting. The desire to be close though—that itself never went away, especially after long nights sleeping out of doors with a kunai tucked inside his shirtsleeve, touch-starved for anything that didn’t glint in the sunlight. 

“What do you do after your missions?” he asked, propping his head up with his hand, elbow buried in the wet sand. When Shisui looked at him askance, he clarified, “To decompress.” 

Shisui let out a long breath, whistling through his teeth. “Oh, um, different things. I sleep a lot. Sometimes I’ll visit a bordello.” He looked down at Itachi, and the way his face twisted meant he could see the flicker in Itachi’s eyes. “Not usually.”

“Mm.” Itachi did reach out this time, letting his fingertips rest against the bone of Shisui’s hip.

While he had never been good at expressing his emotions, he was quick at identifying them. Fear came easily, so did anger and anxiety. The cluster of impulses he felt when Shisui mentioned using sex as a decompressor felt unmistakably like jealousy, maybe even desire. It certainly wasn’t the protectiveness a cousin should feel for a cousin, or a brother for a brother.

Then again, Shisui didn’t need protecting any more than Itachi did. 

Shisui hadn’t responded to Itachi’s initial touch, but he flinched slightly when Itachi slipped his fingers beneath the hem of his shirt, pressing them gently against the skin there.

“Your hands are cold,” was all he said.

Itachi apologized even as he moved his hand higher, rucking up the shirt. His elbow hurt from where he leaned against it so he pushed himself up from the riverbank, leaning into Shisui’s space. The crickets sang from their hiding place in the bushes. 

“Hey Itachi,” Shisui said, unmoving, but his eyes sparkled like sun on the water. “Whatcha doing?”

He almost responded with _decompressing_, but that wasn’t it. The mission hadn’t been that stressful, and the familiarity of this desire stretched back to before Itachi could remember. 

“Take off your shirt, please.” Itachi said, adding the ‘please’ belatedly. Shisui watched him for three, four excruciatingly long heartbeats and then obliged, dropping the garment onto the grass.

He traced his fingers up Shisui’s chest—flat, well-defined, warm under the Konoha sun. He was built to fight in a way Itachi wasn’t, broad where Itachi was slender, blunt where Itachi’s bones joined together at odd, pointed angles. He had a beautiful face, a sharp jaw—Itachi reached up and touched it, watching the way Shisui’s pupils dilated at the caress. It was a good enough signal.

_(Thinking back on it, he realizes it had been too easy. While he has never believed in a god, he does believe in some form of cosmic balance, in ethical retribution, and together they had more blood on their hands than Itachi likes to remember.) _

“I want to be close to you,” he said, and Shisui reached for him in response, hands closing around Itachi’s hips, and Itachi—before he allowed himself to think too hard on it—swung a leg over Shisui’s lap.

Then Shisui took his first kiss, or Itachi gave it to him, like the gift that it was, all tongue and lips and no teeth, soft in a way Itachi had never been before. He tried not to make noise, because years of training had taught him to be silent and also because he did not know what noises he was supposed to make, but Shisui drew them out of him like the haul of a fishing net through water. 

“I want to crawl inside you,” he said, panting, and Shisui laughed. 

“You’re kind of creepy, you know.” But he was smiling, and unlike the kiss, his smile was all white teeth, happy. Itachi liked him like this.

“M’sorry,” Itachi mumbled. He pressed his lips to Shisui’s jaw and tasted saltwater. 

He allowed himself to be rolled onto his back, granules of sand and blades of grass sticking to damp skin, a river of muddied emotions pulling him along, down, under. He ignored the more frightening ones in favor of an intense need to be _closer, _reaching for the body on top of him, for his friend, his cousin, for the one who had carried him home after dark. He liked the rawness of it all, the twigs that dug into the skin of his back and the smell of black mud on the wind; he liked the way Shisui grunted instead of speaking when Itachi licked the salt from his skin, his jōnin blacks scratchy against Itachi’s stomach.

They lay together on the riverbank. His skin felt hot like poison ivy, his hands shaky on Shisui’s shoulders. He began whispering commands and found Shisui obsequious as always when it came to him; together they unearthed the flat planes and rough edges of each other’s bodies, learning where to touch. Itachi wore only a pair of rolled-up pants, Shisui in full getup save his shirt, and every now and again Itachi shivered as he felt the cold metal of a tucked-away weapon come into contact with his skin. He said _there, right there_, and Shisui bit down with his teeth; he pushed, and Shisui moved away onto his elbows, whined and Shisui returned to him, grinning like a lunatic.

Itachi rubbed his thumb over Shisui’s bottom lip. “You’re too good at this.”

“At what?” Shisui asked, still smiling, dark hair tangled. Behind his head, the sky flushed orange. “It’s just kissing.”

“I like just kissing,” Itachi replied, and prayed to the kami that Shisui knew him well enough to know what he meant.

“Only?” he asked. 

Itachi didn’t know for certain, so he shook his head. “No. Just for now.”

“Hm.” Shisui kissed him again, and Itachi really did want to climb underneath his skin and stay there. No more missions, no more ANBU, no more leaving behind Konoha and its rivers and trees and hazy afternoons. It could be just this, the familiarity of family, always.

He wrapped his arms around his cousin’s back and tilted his head to the sky. 

Sasuke interrupted them eventually—Shisui’s face buried in Itachi’s neck, hips stuttering but the both of them still mostly clothed, Itachi holding him close—and they swore him to secrecy.

Months later, Itachi received the gift of a single eye, accompanied by the burning maelstrom of his Mangekyō.

-x-

The memory fades. Memories of him always do.

They had been so young.

_I wanted it to be you,_ Itachi thinks, eyes a little glassy as he watches Naruto sleep, yellow hair too bright. _It doesn’t matter anyway, but I wanted it to be you._

**Author's Note:**

> hey fellow humans my tumblr is [scary-crow](https://scary-crow.tumblr.com/)
> 
> Also, notes on this story's version of reality (I might add to these):
> 
> 1\. You can extract the kyūbi whether the jinchūriki is alive or dead, but the Akatsuki a) don’t know this, and b) think that Naruto knows how the process works, which are the only reasons Naruto is still alive at the beginning of the story.  
2\. You do not have to extract the bijū in order. Or maybe you do, and the Akatsuki just don’t know this. Idk.


End file.
